from the consistent-inconsistency dept

It should be clear by now that Apple sees most of us as the proverbial unwashed masses and is on something of a mission to immolate immoral thought patterns by trying to put everyone's head in the collective sand. That seems to be the only explanation for their app store censoring process, which has in the past removed historical context from games, the human body from consideration, comic books it deems to be immoral, and literature. All, mind you, in the name of a corporate moral code that probably wouldn't hold up under closer scrutiny.

But even if Apple wants to play the morality card, it presents the problem of consistency. Moral stances, after all, don't allow for picking and choosing due to outside factors. Yet that appears to be exactly what is occurring with the latest app store nixing of a popular game about growing marijuana, called Weed Firm.

As you might have noticed the game is no longer available on the Apple App Store. This was entirely Apple's decision, not ours. We guess the problem was that the game was just too good and got to number one in All Categories, since there are certainly a great number of weed based apps still available, as well as games promoting other so-called 'illegal activities' such as shooting people, crashing cars and throwing birds at buildings...If we let hypocrites determine what content is suitable for us we will soon all be watching teletubbies instead of Breaking Bad and playing... oh I don't know… nothing good comes to mind, without some form of 'illegal activity' or other really.

A couple of things to note. First, for those of us that are older than, say, fifteen, the rapid decriminalization of all things marijuana in this country is on a pace that can be described as no less than staggering. If you simply chart out what's gone on over the past decade and extrapolate into the next, it isn't off base to expect marijuana to go the way of tobacco and alcohol within that time. So the morality play is on shaky ground to begin with. Add to that, as Kotaku does, that the only thing consistent about Apple's app removal standards is its astounding inconsistency, and we should probably all begin asking ourselves exactly what the point of any of this is.

You can find places to buy weed on the app store. You can rate different strains of weed. You can download apps that teach you more about marijuana, or get apps that will give you various cosmetic weed changes to your phone. You can even roll fake joints. You can't, however, download a game where you grow marijuana. Other games, such as Weed Farmer and Weed Tycoon, remain active on the app store for now—but these games weren't as popular or as well-rated as Weed Firm was.

What, on the face of it, might have appeared to be a genuine, if misplaced, attempt to apply some kind of moral code suddenly dissolves into a PR response. As long as the marijuana-related games are generating money without being popular enough to draw any kind of wider attention, Apple's moral qualms go by the wayside. They either don't have the interest or the actual capacity to actively police all such offending games. Either answer renders the morality play moot to begin with: either you can enforce your strict guidelines in general or you can't. Apple, in the case of games revolving around marijuana, clearly can't. So what are we all doing here?

Well, we're suffering under Apple's delusion that we're children, of course. Children in need of a firm hand and the guidance of our parents, which apparently somehow became Apple. I suppose it isn't all that different from the old AOL walled-internet days, which I happily note went the hell away over a decade ago when the internet and its average denizen grew up. Maybe it's time now for Apple to stop it with the whole Puritan routine and start trusting their customers a bit more?

from the cutting-off-your-nose dept

One purpose for which micropayment solution Flattr (which we use here on Techdirt) has certainly caught on is providing a way for people to support podcasts. Apparently, simple integration allowing people to designate some money for podcasters has just "felt right" for lots of users who do exactly that. And some podcasting/podcatching apps have tried to accommodate this. Instacast, a popular app for downloading and listening to podcasts on the iOS platform, integrated Flattr back in February, but in early May the arbitrary gatekeepers at Apple rejected the app because the Flattr integration went against Apple's demands that all in-app payments go through its own system. Vemedio (the makers of Instacast) along with the folks at Flattr appealed to Apple that this was ridiculous... but Apple issued a final decision rejecting the app. In response, Vemedio is very reluctantly removing Flattr from its app, meaning podcasters just lost a good way of making money, all because Apple can't control it. More evidence of Apple becoming a rather evil gatekeeper, rather than an enabler of new and interesting ideas.

from the disruption-at-work dept

Tim Lee points us to a really fantastic (as per usual) discussion with Clay Shirky about media disruption, in which he makes the key point that publishing is no longer a job, but a button:

Publishing is not evolving. Publishing is going away. Because the word “publishing” means a cadre of professionals who are taking on the incredible difficulty and complexity and expense of making something public. That’s not a job anymore. That’s a button. There’s a button that says “publish,” and when you press it, it’s done.

In ye olden times of 1997, it was difficult and expensive to make things public, and it was easy and cheap to keep things private. Privacy was the default setting. We had a class of people called publishers because it took special professional skill to make words and images visible to the public. Now it doesn’t take professional skills. It doesn’t take any skills. It takes a Wordpress install.

Now, of course, publishing as a profession means more than just making public, but that is the root of it, and Shirky is absolutely right that that role is changing completely -- and that means that the industries that built themselves up by glorifying their ability to be a gatekeeper in making things public are going to struggle to adapt. There certainly are other important roles, but they're not "publishing" per se.:

The question isn’t what happens to publishing — the entire category has been evacuated. The question is, what are the parent professions needed around writing? Publishing isn’t one of them. Editing, we need, desperately. Fact-checking, we need. For some kinds of long-form texts, we need designers. Will we have a movie-studio kind of setup, where you have one class of cinematographers over here and another class of art directors over there, and you hire them and put them together for different projects, or is all of that stuff going to be bundled under one roof? We don’t know yet. But the publishing apparatus is gone. Even if people want a physical artifact — pipe the PDF to a printing machine.

When you think about it, this really does hit on the key point of disruption for so many of the industries we talk about today. The main role that the gatekeepers had was in helping to "make your work public." But that role isn't needed any more (nor is there any real gate any more). You can make anything public that you want and reach the entire world. Of course, there are still plenty of other things -- making it better, promoting it, monetizing it, etc. And all of those roles are very important, but the role of making something public was the only one that really had that gate. And since there was that gate, the gatekeeper could control everything and demand total ownership over the work. That's what we've seen for centuries.

The difference today is that the gates are gone, the need for help to make something public is gone, and those other things -- publicity, improving the product, monetizing, etc. -- can all be done by lots of organizations, rather than just a few. Thus, there is no need for gatekeepers, but (once again), it's all about the enablers. The enablers help make your work better, but still leave you and the work at the center. The gatekeepers stripped your work from you for a pittance. It's a very different world, but it's a much better world for creators -- and it all comes back to the fact that publishing is no longer a job, but a button.

from the hello,-html-5 dept

For quite some time now, we've been pointing out that for all the folks pissed off about Apple's very closed nature when it comes to the App Store, combined with it's ridiculously high 30% cut demanded on any in-app content purchases, there would be a growing trend to route around Apple as a gatekeeper, using HTML5 web apps. While such apps can't provide all the features of native apps, they can provide an awful lot. And, to be honest, a large percentage of native apps are really HTML5/javascript/CSS web apps wrapped up and compiled. But as Apple puts more and more conditions on things, people are going to route around the gatekeeper, and it's nice to see some big names realizing this. First up is the Financial Times, which has created an HTML5 web app that can be used on the iPhone/iPad without having to go through Apple's purchase process and without having to deal with Apple's restrictive rules.

It may be limited right now, but more and more companies are going to recognize they don't need to go through the gatekeeper here. And as alternative means of distribution and discovery become more popular, the key advantage of the official App Store begin to fade away. I would imagine that over time, Apple may be forced to back down on some of its more ridiculous conditions and pricing, as more players realize that they don't have to go that route.

from the are-you-scared-yet? dept

Two separate stories in the NY Times provide fodder for those who view Google as the new scary borg. The first, looks at Google's sometimes slippery slope role as a "gatekeeper" of information within certain countries. For example, it looks at Google's agreement to help block access to certain YouTube videos in Thailand and similar decisions in other countries. The article plays up Google's reluctance to be involved in making these sorts of decisions (and highlights how the company hopes that more countries learn to accept free speech a bit more), but it still leaves you with this questionable feeling of Google as quasi-government censor. No matter how well-meaning the people may be who are making the decisions, it still feels questionable.

The second article isn't just about Google, but talks about how, with various online services, many people are effectively giving up their privacy. This is hardly a new topic, and it's one that's been discussed repeatedly -- often with a nod to the famous Scott McNealy quote from almost a decade ago: "You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it." The article touches on a lot more than just Google, but does mention the fact that Google seems to have access to all sorts of data that, when clumped together, could be seen as a violation of privacy for some.

Between the two stories, you can see why there's a growing sense of worry among some about how Google could become dangerous. It has access to all sorts of data about you -- and has the power to make decisions about what you can access, often with no explanation or recourse. Put that together, and you get this picture of Google as the benevolent dictator of the internet -- where it may be using its powers (mostly) for good, but there's plenty of potential that eventually it could turn evil. And, to some extent, it's worth highlighting these issues, so that people don't become complacent about Google's actions. But, there's an undercurrent to these stories that seem to miss out on a few things: if Google really does start abusing either of these "powers," unlike with a dictator, people have pretty easy choices to go elsewhere. Furthermore, as more concerns are raised about any potential abuse, people are rapidly working on technologies that solve both issues -- allowing people to surf the internet much more anonymously, while also routing around censorship. So, while it's not problematic to highlight these potential issues with Google, that doesn't mean that there aren't necessary checks and balances in place.

from the how-does-this-benefit-anyone? dept

Following the recent post we had about Apple taking down popular games from its App store, the latest buzz in on Apple denying a comic book reader entrance to its iPhone app store because the primary comic book being offered was too violent. This has created quite an uproar -- though, again, Apple has been upfront about the fact that this is a closed system from the beginning. So, it's not entirely clear why people are pissed off at Apple. It hasn't mislead anyone about the fact that it will block and censor content and apps.

Still, it does make you wonder why Apple is bothering? All it seems to do is piss off people. It takes extra work and effort on Apple's part and it's hard to see who benefits. Plenty of other systems out there allow anyone to develop apps and content, and they get by just fine, often using user feedback systems to make sure that "bad" content and apps get weeded out fast, without any complaints from users. Having Apple set itself up as the ultimate gatekeeper isn't "censorship" -- it's just pointless.

from the let's-try-this-again... dept

The CEO of the Associated Press, Tom Curley, gave a speech yesterday to a group of news executives supposedly calling on them to drop their antiquated ways, learn to embrace the new opportunities of the internet and, most importantly, ditch the mindset of being the gatekeepers of the news. At least, that's what the Associated Press's own writeup on his speech suggests. It's powerful stuff, but it seems a little odd. After all, isn't this the same Associate Press that less than a month ago sued Moreover for linking to AP articles? Isn't this the same Associated Press that pressured Google to pay for the same thing? That doesn't sound like an organization that's trying to stop being a gatekeeper and embracing the new opportunities of the internet. It sounds like the opposite.

So, let's go to the details. Thankfully, the AP also published the full text of Curley's speech so we can dig into the details a bit. While the AP reporter's coverage of his speech definitely does capture the gist of it, it leaves out some of the key (and somewhat contradictory) details. So, while Curley says: "Our focus must be on becoming the very best at filling people’s 24-hour news needs. That's a huge shift from the we-know-best, gatekeeper thinking" his own plan doesn't seem to agree with that. He later says: "we're coupling those initiatives with strong new efforts to protect news web sites from unauthorized scraping through tighter site protocols and content tagging." Sorry, but it's those protections against scraping that is part of the gatekeeper thinking. He also says: "Enforcement, too, must be a part. What we do comes at great cost and sacrifice, even death. We believe content should have wide distribution. We intend to be compensated for it." and "We have the power to control how our content flows on the Web. We must use that power...." In other words, we're going to restrict access to what we do in order to create artificial scarcity in order to charge for it. Restricting access is what might also be called gatekeeping. It seems like Curley's big wake up call to newspaper execs is really "say goodbye to the old gatekeeper, and say hello to the new gatekeeper."

There are plenty of business models that make sense for the Associated Press, but it's pretty amusing for the CEO of that organization to call for getting rid of the old way of thinking and then outline what's basically the same old thinking.